There are historical records of it being used just in general since before the US slave trade. It wasn’t used deliberately as a perjorative despite the meaning clearly being that they were not seen as humans. It was also sometimes used to mean anyone “not white.”
It gets fuzzy before then; there aren’t good records for that. But considering how Europeans saw themselves, I can’t imagine that it wasn’t used at all then too.
There are historical records of it being used just in general since before the US slave trade. It wasn’t used deliberately as a perjorative despite the meaning clearly being that they were not seen as humans. It was also sometimes used to mean anyone “not white.”
It gets fuzzy before then; there aren’t good records for that. But considering how Europeans saw themselves, I can’t imagine that it wasn’t used at all then too.